All right, let’s wrap this up quickly. We’ve all got a weekend to get to. 1. The NAACP Goes Full Blazing Saddles In perhaps the greatest movie ever made, Mel Brooks’ seminal classic satirical Western Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little plays a newly appointed sheriff of a frontier town whose skin color shocks and dismays the simple-minded locals whose racial views are less than enlightened. It turns out, however, that Little’s character is quick on the uptake and devises a foolproof strategy to keep from being lynched by the townsfolk upon his arrival (warning to the unwashed — a certain word appears here that is only acceptable to say in a rap track)… I’m assuming that the people heading up the NAACP these days are big Cleavon Little/Blazing Saddles fans, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for this: (The Center Square) – Black athletes in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina at public universities are being encouraged to join the NAACP’s Out of Bounds campaign and boycott athletic programs. Power 4 conference schools in the Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 could be impacted. The request is in response to the Supreme Court ruling announced April 29, striking down a congressional map in Louisiana it says relied too heavily on race. “Black athletes should not be asked to generate wealth, prestige and power for state institutions while those same states strip political power from Black communities,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A day earlier, the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to NCAA President Charlie Baker and leaders of the SEC and ACC advising its members would be in opposition to the SCORE Act. The legislation unifies athletes’ contracting rights nationwide. So black kids should turn down the millions of dollars in NIL swag schools like LSU, Bama, Georgia, and Texas A&M are offering because of congressional politics? Don’t draw Steve Cohen out of his district of Rick Barnes’ basketball Volunteers end up white like Casper? The funny thing about that is that the big college basketball programs are already camping out in Europe and doing their best to land Euroleague pros as their big stars. But even funnier is the fact that if you talk to elite athletes in a private setting, and perhaps not black athletes in particular but not because they’re an exception, what you’ll find is they skew a LOT more conservative than regular Americans do. They tend to be more religious, though not necessarily more socially conservative (the baseball players are usually super-conservative socially, football players a little less so, and the basketball players are generally pretty libertine), and when it comes to taxes and economics, they’re as far-right as it gets. For an obvious reason. They’ve got a generally small window of 15 years or so where they have the opportunity to amass generational wealth, and then that opportunity largely passes. Obviously the investments they make with what they earn while playing ball can keep them comfortable, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make $6 million a year, or perhaps much more, when the game passes them by. So those dollars are precious. They want to put away as many as they can. And leftist redistributionist politics fly hard in the face of that objective. That 19-year-old kid who has the opportunity to sign a $3 million NIL deal at Auburn, which means his mom gets to live in a nice house rather than whatever Section 8 shack she’s had to raise him and his brothers and sisters in, when Auburn is driving distance away and she can come to all of his games, has zero figs to give for what Derrick Johnson says. This is actually a great thing. When it has absolutely no impact whatsoever on college sports recruiting, it will demonstrate how little influence the NAACP has inside the black community — or at least within one very visible, very prominent sliver of that community that is important enough to merit Johnson’s messaging here. Fans, boosters, and politicians in SEC states are not as gullible as the citizens of Rock Ridge. And Derrick Johnson isn’t quite as wily as Cleavon’s character. Otherwise? Bold strategy, Cotton! 2. No, We Don’t Need More Bombing in Iran President Trump keeps talking about how he almost sent in the Tomahawks and the jets to blow up stuff in Iran and how he might still do it. And he probably should keep mentioning it, if for no other reason than to goose the negotiations with those Iranians willing to negotiate. Though those Iranians don’t seem to be the ones in charge. The ones in charge appear to have a special penchant for provocative attacks designed to make a mockery of the ceasefire and suck Trump back into an open conflict, in the hopes of one day shooting down a plane and capturing the pilots, or achieving some other propaganda war victory amid all the kinetic destruction they’re bringing down on their country. Meanwhile, there is the blockade of Iran’s ports that is slowly strangling the regime as it bleeds out financially. This will ultimately gain the result everyone by now understands is necessary, which is that the Iranians take back their government from the insane Stone Age barbarians who’ve ruled the place for the last 47 years. But what evidence is there that this is about to happen? I can’t say I have much. I did see one interesting item this week, though: